Only what is human can truly be foreign

Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Psalm' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 100

Beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge

Having learnt from the time I was at school that there is nothiing one can imagine so strange or so unbelievable that has not been said by one or other of the philosophers; and since then, while travelling, having recognized that all those who hold opinions quite opposed to ours are not on that account barbarians or savages, but that many exercise as much reason as we do, or more; and having considered how a given man, with his given mind, being brought up from childhood among the French or Germans, becomes different from what he would be if he had always lived among the Chinese or among cannibals; and how, down to our very fashions in dress, what pleased us ten years ago and will perhaps please us again before another ten years are out, now seems to us extravagant and laughable, I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge, and, nevertheless that the assent of many voices is not a valid proof for truths which are rather difficult to discover, because they are much more likely to be found by one single man than by a whole people. Thus I could not choose anyone whose opinions it seemed to me I ought to prefer to those of others, and I found myself constrained, as it were, to undertake my own guidance.

René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations (Penguin Classics, 1968) p. 39

Unproof is the ground of action

"The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"
"That we shall die."
"Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p.70

Maybe a specialist is only a coward

"Old Sam Hamilton saw this coming. He said there couldn't be any more universal philosophers. The weight of knowledge is too great for one mind to absorb. He saw a time when one man would know only one little fragment, but he would know it well."
"Yes," Lee said from the doorway, "and he deplores it. He hated it."
"Did he now?" Adam asked.
[...]
"Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small," said Lee. "Maybe, kneeling down to atoms, they're becoming atom-sized in their souls. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses – the whole world over his fence."
"We're only talking about making a living."
"A living – or money," Lee said excitedly. "Money's easy to make if it's money you want. But with few exceptions people don't want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration."
"All right. But do you have any objection to college? That's what we're talking about."
"I'm sorry," said Lee. "You're right, I do seem to get too excited. No, if college is where a man can go to find his relation to his whole world, I don't object. Is it that?"

John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin Books, 2000) pp. 652-653

They know the dawn will come

We Humans must labour to believe, as the other Creatures do not. They know the dawn will come. They can sense it – that ruffling of the half-light, the horizon bestirring itself.

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Virago Press, 2010) p. 279

Do your own bit of saving

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They're Caesar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (HarperVoyager, 2008) p. 112

No more illusions about technology

No more illusions about technology. We do not control what we produce. Knowing how to do it doesn't mean we know what we are doing. Let's try to be a little more modest, and let's try to understand the riddle of what we produce. Inventions, the creations of scientists are riddles which expand the field of the unknown, so to speak. And there we have an inversion. This inversion is not pessimistic per se, it's an inversion of principle. We no longer start from a positivistic or negativistic idea, we start from a relativistic idea. The problem is the following: technology is a riddle, so let's work on the riddle and stop working only on technology.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 76-77

Death is an interruption of knowledge

Death is an interruption of knowledge. All interruptions are. And it's because there is an interruption of knowledge that a time proper to it is constituted. The rhythm of the alternation of consciousness and unconsciousness is "picnolepsy", the picnoleptic interruption (from the Greek picnos, "frequent"), which helps us exist in a duration which is our own, of which we are conscious. All interruptions structure this consciousness and idealize it.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 47-48

Making a hole in knowledge

An irrevocable step forward has been made through the critique of earlier concepts of the subject, which is thoroughly based on the notion that truth is not a qualification of knowledge nor an intuition of the intelligible. One must come to conceive of truth as making a hole in knowledge.

Alain Badiou, 'On a Finally Objectless Subject' in Topoi 7 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988) p.94

The thing as portrayed by the natural sciences

If we weigh and measure a thing, describe its physical properties, or note its objective position in space-time, these qualities hold good for the thing only insofar as it relates to us or to something else. In short, the thing as portrayed by the natural sciences is the thing made dependent on our knowledge, and not in its untamed, subterranean reality.

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011) pp. 53-54

The more informed man is the more the desert expands

Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection. We're still here in the domain of cinematic illusion, of the mirage of information precipitated on the computer screen – what is given is exactly the information but not the sensation; it is apatheia, this scientific impassibility which makes it so that the more informed man is the more the desert of the world expands around him, the more the repetition of information (already known) upsets the stimuli of observation, overtaking them automatically, not only in memory (interior light) but first of all in the look, to the point that from now on it's the speed of light itself which limits the reading of information and the important thing in electronic-information is no longer the storage but the display.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 46

Knowledge and thought have parted company for good

But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998) p. 3

Modernist architecture

Modernist architecture, just as the positivism that formed its foundations, was as single layered and hierarchical as the damaged cultural tissue it claimed to erase. Modernist architecture was too classical in its knowledge, too tied to cause-and-effect conceptions of process, too slavish in its worship of the machine (and its deterministic processes) to embody the chaotic spirit of the new age. Architecture, tied then and now to hierarchies of authority of both the left and the right, to modernist and postmodernist doctrines, has missed out on the revolution in knowledge that occurred in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and that continues today.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 15

We can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products of its decay remain. There are two: one is the rumour about the true things (a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete); the other product of this diathesis is folly – which, to be sure, has utterly squandered the substance of wisdom, but preserves its attractiveness and assurance, which rumour invariably lacks.

Walter Benjamin, 'Max Brod's Book on Kafka' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 142

FREEDOM: a state emptied of preconceived value, use, function, meaning; an extreme state of loss within which choice is unavoidable; a condition of maximum potential, realised fully in the present moment.
[...]
KNOWLEDGE: the invention of the world in all the complexity and multiplicity of its phenomena.
ARCHITECTURE: instrument for the invention of knowledge through action; the invention of invention.
[...]
HIERARCHY: a predetermined vertical chain of authority that works from the top down.
HETERARCHY: a spontaneous lateral network of autonomous individuals; a system of authority based on the evolving performances of individuals, eg, a cybernetic circus.
[...]
CONSTRUCTION: the invention of reality.
REALITY: a state necessitating the invention of construction.
OBJECTIVE/SUBJECTIVE: terms of dualism divorcing experience from reality.
[...]
BEAUTY: 'knowledge without interest'; ideas embodied in and transcended by forms.
[...]
MEANING: the free interaction of values.
[...]
RELATIVITY THEORY: the great destroyer of hierarchies; description of the world according to an observer.
[...]
CONSUMERISM: a state of becoming limited by the total entropy of a system.
MASS CULTURE: a system diminishing the autonomy of individuals; a state of undifferentiated nature within which the making of distinctions is difficult.
REVOLUTION: self-cancelling mass political machinations; the necessity of formlessness.
[...]
FORM: the condition of boundaries, perceived as exterior to self.
SPACE: the condition of boundaries, perceived as interior to self.
[...]
STRUGGLE: the essential condition of freedom.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Glossary' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 142

Self-preserving cultures seek static equilibrium, the maintenance of a status quo, as the founding principle of social coherence. The means of this maintenance is conformity to standards and norms. Contradictions, conflicts and paradoxes are intolerable in such societies, because they are inconsistencies that undermine requisite conventions.

Contemporary society is not self-preserving, but essentially self-transforming. It seeks dynamic equilibrium. Continual change is what it is based on, and what it needs above all else. This extends fully into the realm of knowledge, what it is and what it means today. Knowledge is no longer that inertial body of facts which enforces stasis, but is in fact the impetus to and energy driving change on every level of society and culture.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Heterarchies' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 46

So long as the concept of hierarchy dominates architecture (as it presently does), architecture will stay rooted in classical models, at the urban and building scales alike. So long as architecture stays rooted in classical models (as it presently does), it will continue to express an old, even archaic, idea of knowledge. So long as architecture expresses another idea of knowledge than that which best serves the present conditions of living (as it presently does), architecture will be a regressive force in the world of human affairs, even of human existence itself.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Heterarchies' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 46

No puzzling, no arguments, just pure experience. Knowing a thing just as it is known. No dualisms or those other tight systems that end in resolution, therefore in spiritual death. Better to know nothing, than to know those as true.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Centricity'' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 27

Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well.

Anatole France, The Gods Will Have Blood (Penguin Books, 1990) p. 71

Genernas programkod lika välordnad, i grunden lika reduktionistiskt enkel, om än i praktiken mer komplex genom sin blotta omfattning. På denna mikroskopiska nivå förstoras vetenskapens begränsning upp till tydlighet: förståelse omdefinieras till kvantifiering, insikt blir till indentifikation. Om vi vet vilka signalsubstanser som produceras i hjärnan då vi älskar, har vi förstått kärlek? Genom att kartlägga det mänskliga genomet, förklarar vi människan? Möjligen, om vi omdefinierar också henne, till hormonproduktion och egenintresse. Den själviska människan, styrd av den själviska genen: kanske är hennes förklaring inget annat än en utdragen sekvens av ATGC.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) pp. 100-101